Windsor's unemployment rate up to 10%

With Windsor's unemployment rate once again reaching double digits, it's no surprise many people are leaving the city to find work, says the head of a worker recruitment and retention agency.

New graduates and highly skilled workers are increasingly turning to places like Chatham-Kent, Toronto and Calgary to find jobs, said Tanya Antoniw, executive director of Workforce Windsor Essex.

"We are losing some of our talented...individuals," she told CBC News. "It's becoming increasingly important for us to retain them or attract them back."

The region'sunemployment rate increased again in November, climbingto 10 per cent fromthe 9.8per cent mark recorded in October.

Windsor maintained its record for havingthe highest jobless rate among major Canadian cities.

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"We're up [to] 10 per cent, that's definitely going in the wrong direction," said Percy Hatfield, the MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh. "That's not something to be proud of being the unemployment capital of Canada, that's for sure."

Hatfieldsaid heand his fellow New Democrat MPPsfrom the region regularly lobby Liberal ministers about bringing investment to Windsor, but said there's no single solution to creating jobs.

"Everybody has to pull together at times like this and say, 'What can we do? How do we change this around? How do we turn the economy around?'" he said.

Energy costs blamed

Attracting new investment in the region, particularly within the manufacturing sector, continues to be a challenge largely because of Ontario's electricity costs, according to Lydia Miljan, apolitical science professor at the University of Windsor.

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Referencing the recent auditor general's report that slamsthe province for high energy costs, Miljan saidgovernment is not making Ontario, particularly the Windsor region, an attractive place to do business.

"They simply have a position that they think that we need to pay more for electricity and that has consequences economically," she told CBC News. "Since the provincial government controls the price of electricity, and in this province in particular electricity prices have skyrocketed, that makes it that more difficult for manufacturers to want to set up shop."